I’m feeling really old.
When I was a kid, to see a “new” motion picture you had to go to a theater. IF they, in a couple of years, featured the movie during ABC’s Sunday Night at the Movies it would be chopped up, edited and full of commercials.
HBO reared it’s ugly head and started showing movies uncut, unedited, and without commercials. You could finally see the “real” movie, but you had to wait a while before it got released to cable.
Then came VCRs and, with them, video rental stores. If the movie was a blockbuster, it might be over a year before they released it on tape.
With DVDs we still had rentals - remember when Netflix was primarily a DVD rental service? - and there was a lot of consternation regarding how fast a movie went to disk.
Now we have streaming services that show the movie in an unedited form, sometimes at the same time the movie is showing in theaters.
Movie theaters are soooooo screwed...
It’s the communal experience that I value. Also seeing something on a huge screen...
Spiderman just pulled a $260 million weekend. Theaters are fine. So long as it’s movies people want to see.